Uncle Eric snorted, shocked. “Gurrrrrl,” he purred, fumbling through the pocket of his robe. “Go on, now. Tell us how you really feel.” He produced a lighter and lit his cigarette and looked hard into Frankie’s eyes when he exhaled.
“It’s true,” she said. “I’ve seen them. They’re probably dead right now.”
Uncle Eric shook his head admiringly. “I doubt that, Hon. What with modern medicine and all. But still.” He shuffled to the refrigerator with his cane and brought out the cake, from which he cut a slice. He served it to Frankie on a paper towel at the chrome table. “I bet they looked bad off.” He sat down across from Frankie with an amber ashtray and a coffee mug shaped like a woman’s breast. “Didn’t anybody tell you the story of your dad’s and my birth? Everybody thought we wouldn’t make it. And now, see? Look.” Uncle Eric tilted his head back like a supermodel and puckered his lips. He rapped his cane on the floor three times. “They were right about one of us.” At this, Eric laughed long and hard, and Frankie could tell he expected her to do the same. Eric pointed to her cake and then at her. “Oh, I’m just playing, Doll.” He crushed out his cigarette and winked. “Now, you eat that, and then I want to show you something.”
In the grandmother’s jewelry box, next to the gold watch, Frankie had found a tarnished silver locket, as dark as if it had been dropped into a fire, as black as the lung the doctor had held up on television to warn children against smoking. Inside the locket, on the right side, was a small round picture of Frankie’s father when he was about her age, which Frankie could not imagine had ever been the case, but there it was: photographic proof. On the left side of the locket, there was a tiny dot of glue and a white flake of photo paper. Uncle Eric was missing, having fallen off, Frankie guessed, after years of having a blind woman rake her hands over him. But as her grandmother dozed and Frankie messed through the giant synthetic pearls and tangles of brassy chains, Uncle Eric’s round face appeared, ghostly, inside a tiny cellophane envelope, an insect’s wing among scrap metal. From what Frankie could gather, Uncle Eric had been removed and relocated with intention, plucked off by her grandmother’s thick, clouded fingernails.
Frankie thought of this as Uncle Eric brought out his dress. It was a floor-length gown with a mermaid cut, made of thousands of red feathers. On his shoulders he wore a sequined red, blue, and yellow cape that he could slide his arms into and spread like wings. “I’m a scarlet macaw,” he said. “I’m thinking I should make a hood for it. To go over my head. With a beak and all.”
Frankie was mesmerized. “What’s it for?” she asked her uncle. “Where will you wear it?”
Eric leaned on his cane. “My show, Sugar,” he said. “I wear it and I sing the song ‘Somebody, Somewhere’ by Loretta Lynn. You know Loretta, Sweetheart?”
Frankie shook her head. She wasn’t interested in the song part. “Where’s your nest?” she asked. “Every bird needs a nest.”
Eric stopped and said nothing. He was thinking. “A nest,” he whispered, his eyes darting around the room as if collecting supplies. “You mean, like an origin story?”
“No,” Frankie said. “Like a nest.”
Uncle Eric leaned forward on his cane, his long fingers curled over the crook like a parrot grasping its perch. “You want to know where I came from? I dream it all the time. I’ve had the same dream for thirty-eight years.”
Frankie thought of her grandmother. “Your mother?”
Eric rolled his eyes. “Oh, Sister, please. Air France. I have this dream I’m on an Air France plane. Except it’s not so much a plane as it is a saucer. It’s like an Air France UFO. And I’m flying on it with hundreds and hundreds of other people. At this point, I’ve had the dream so many times, I’ve started to recognize these people. To anticipate them. They’re decent, I guess. But I can’t find any common denominator. We’re not all trannies. We’re not all Americans. But there we are: on an Air France UFO flying from Charles de Gaulle to fucking—sorry, freaking—Atlanta.”
Frankie frowned. “That’s how you got here?”
Eric nodded, fumbling through his robe pockets for his lighter and Viceroys. “Yep.” He produced a cigarette, which seemed to bring him the same sort of relief Frankie’d felt when her father had said it was time to leave the hospital. “So. Where did you come from?”
Frankie thought for a moment. “My parents went down to the train station and showed the conductor a ticket. Like the kind you show the butcher when you wait in line for a roast.”
Eric exhaled rapidly in approval. “And?”
“He gave them a suitcase and I was in it.” Frankie thought some more. “I looked pretty good to them until a few years later. That was when they started going down to the train station for another baby, but the suitcases they kept picking up were empty. Then I didn’t look so great anymore. It was like when you look at a word for a really long time and it stops making sense.”
“Oh, this is good, Dollbaby.”
“And they just kept going down to the train station with their butcher ticket until finally the conductor got tired of them and to make them go away he gave them a suitcase out of the lost and found.” Frankie folded her arms and shook her head as if she stood on the sidelines of a playing field, watching a losing team. “The suitcase had two babies in it, but they’d been in lost and found for a long time and didn’t look so good.”
Uncle Eric looked like he was going to cry. “Oh, Princess,” he sniffed. “You’re an old soul, you know that?”
Frankie thought for a moment. Uncle Eric smoked and flapped his cape. “Where do you think babies go when they die? Back to the train station?”
Uncle Eric sat on the edge of his bed. He tapped his cigarette out on the bottom of his slipper, and Frankie watched the red ashes fall to the braided rug and die. Then he lit a second cigarette and Frankie thought of his lungs, a black, tarnished locket open in his chest. “I don’t know where babies go when they die,” he said. “I don’t know where grown-ups go.”
Frankie stood and assessed Uncle Eric’s bedroom. She began with a quilt, which she placed in the center of the round braided rug, and she made it into the base of a nest. Then she went looking for other things in his drawers and closet: a towel, a second silk robe, a set of paisley sheets. “In October I have my first reconciliation,” she said. “I have to tell Father Greg all the things I’ve ever done wrong. Then in April, I take Communion. That means from then on, if I die, I go to hell if I’m not sorry.”
Eric exhaled and shook his head and rapped out his second cigarette on his slipper with such intent that Frankie thought the rug or his shoe might catch on fire. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ,” he said. “No seven-year-old is going to hell.”
Frankie shrugged. “It wouldn’t scare me,” she said. “I might even like it.”
Uncle Eric bowed his head. “You and me both. I wouldn’t know a damn soul in heaven anyway.” He reached out to hug Frankie and she let him, but she kept her arms at her side. She wanted to hug him back, but then, when her father came to take her home, she’d be devastated.
“Let’s make the nest,” she said.
“Yes,” Uncle Eric said, clapping his hands together once. “Let’s.”
Frankie and Uncle Eric gathered all the clothes and towels and bedding they could find. There were velvets and terry cloths, batiks and patchworks, paisleys and polka dots and shawls with knotted fringe. When they were done, they sat in the middle and ate pink cake.
“You didn’t eat a W,” Frankie said. “You ate a B.”
Uncle Eric’s eyes went big and bright. “No fooling you, Sister. What else do you know?”